Paul was born in the German town of Hanau in 1895, on December Sixteen. We might assume that Hindemith felt a pull in the musical direction from a very early age; Pauls father was a painter and did not want his son becoming a musician, so our little composer-to-be ran away at the age of 11, and started his own life. Paul taught himself the violin and viola, and began earning his living by playing at Cafes and other such establishments. Eventually, Hindemith learned the rudiments of all the instruments that mattered, so he could play them at least passably– but he as surely a virtuoso at his viola and viola damore.
Eventually, Hindemith ended up at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where he studied his music performance under the tutelage of people like Arnold Mendelssohn. While there, Hindemith showed increasing interest in the field of composition– he began writing in earnest around the time he completed his courses at the Conservatory, and began establishing himself in the music culture through chamber music and expressionistic opera. Paul landed a pretty major job in the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra… he was first oncertmaster, and then conductor over the years 1915-1923.
After this, he founded his Amar String Quartet, for which he was violist– the group became pretty celebrated and performed successfully throughout Europe. Its agreed that 1921 was when Hindemith began to come into his own, and emerge as well-known into the world as a composer and performer. Hindemith appeared regularly at the Donaueschingen Festival starting that year, and in 1922-24 his Chamber Works were performed at the Salzburg Festival (which I assume was a fairly big deal at the time).
Up until about 1925, Hindemith was pretty conventional, going along more or less complacently with the musical norms of his time. But in 1925, he came out with Kammermusik, his first openly atonal composition. The piece was representative of new ideas, and roused lots of talk when it was performed at the Venice Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music. Before he knew it, Paul was a sort of pioneer, a figurehead of the advancing frontier in Modern Music. Ah– during these years of his life, Hindemith was working as a professor of Composition t the Berlin Hochschule.
It was around 1934 that Hindemith started having some trouble with the Nazis. For one, they didnt like his music. In fact, Alfred Rosenberg, who was Chief of Nazi Foreign Affairs, said his musics were the foulest perversions of German music. Obviously, the Nazis gave his career a hard time and tried to squelch his fame. You see, the Nazis probably gave Hindemith a hard time because he was married to a half-Jewess, and also made recordings with Jews, whom he refused to break off with. Besides, the Nazis were stuffy bigwigs and found all progressive music ndesirable.
Nevertheless, everything went pretty well for Paul until that year, 1934. Mathis Der Mahler came out and was given a debut performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. Everyone loved it, and it was set to be staged as an opera, but alas, the Nazis scrapped the idea because they didnt like anything creative and new. The conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, wrote a nasty letter about the Nazis veto of the venture, and had it published– unfortunately, Hitler himself got mad at Furtwangler and Hindemith, so Paul had to pack up and move away to Turkey to avoid unpleasantness.
He spent a year or so in Turkey revitalizing the music life there, then shipped off to the USA on an invitation from Elizabeth Coolige. He played a USA debut concert in Washington, D. C. , on April Tenth, in 1937. He frequented the USA from then on as a violinist and a conductor. He returned to America in 1938 for the debut of his ballet, St. Francis. The book says Hindemith had become an American Citizen in 1936, so obviously Paul had plans for the USA and was ready for his career there.
At last, in 1939, Paul decided to move there while Germany was stuck in W. W. II, and sat tight. Hindemith taught at Yale and got to lecture at Harvard. He wrote some on theory, and composed a whole bunch while he was in the States. In 1944 he visited Germany and had a street named in his honor. The musicians there wanted Paul to return and stay, but he declined to do so until 1953, when he moved to Zurich. By now, Hindemith was something of a celebrity– he emerged as the most important German composer after W.
W. II; in1955 he won the $35000 Sibelius Award; in 1960, the NY Critics Circle Award; and in 1962, the $52000 Italian Balzan Prize. Sources seem to agree that Hindemiths style was ever-maturing, up until he died of a stroke in 1963, in a Frankfurt hospital on December 29. It was just shortly after his last conductors gig in Berlin. Early on, in the twenties, Hindemith had a sort of shock phase, in which his works showed influence from what the Europeans knew to be jazz, like the Suite 1922 and Cardillac.
Later on in the thirties, Hindemith began to feel responsible for some kind of ethnic purity in his music, a conviction surely galvanized by the Nazi anti-art-innovation movements going on at the time. Also during this period, he moved on from chamber works to a more prominent tendency to Symphonic composition. While in this phase, his music became smoother and less focused on counterpoint ( a tendency that developed most probably as a result of his appreciation of Bach).
In 1937-9, Hindemith wrote extensively on the properties of the scale degrees and intervals in rankings from consonant to dissonant, in Craft of Musical Composition. In this later period following the publication of his writings, Hindemith wrote concertos and sonatas for most of the standard instruments. Overall, it seems that Hindemiths music was not profound in its auditory flow, but in its hard musical theory– the people who most liked Hindemiths works were musicians and theory experts who could appreciate the nuance and creative techniques he utilized in his music.
One of the most interesting things about Hindemiths style is his tendency to, or interest in, building chords on fourths instead of the conventional thirds. Hindemith must have led a rather dry life; no where in any of my sources was mentioned his family life, or childhood traits, or anything of the sort– all of his biography seems centered round his musical career, which leads me to surmise that Hindemith was probably a rather banal person to be around, not the wild radical youd expect him to be from listening to his music.
Some interesting facts about Hindemith are as follows: He liked carpentry on occasion; He was especially interested in the interval of a fourth; he liked to play with toy trains, like little kids have; later on in his life, he tried some cartooning, and discovered he was quite talented at it– in fact, Paul used his cartoon drawings as the covers for cards he sent out to friends and relatives for olidays, etc. Hindemith made himself a sort of Anti-Schoenberg in the later years of his life, because he fell out of general favor, while Schoenberg began to grow increasingly popular.
He tried to satirize Schoenbergs dodecaphony in some works making use of 11 and 13 note rows, but no one caught on and Hindemith never succeeded in changing much. In general, his style became sort of introverted in his later years, and Hindemith today is a rather obscure composer when compared to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who had people advocate their names later on in the century, and keep their music popular.